Livermore gene detectives have used a new "lab on a chip" to rapidly identify ancient plague bacteria from a body in a London cemetery where victims were buried during the "Black Death" that devastated 14th century Europe.

In another example of the high-speed gene-sniffing system's power, the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say they also detected cholera microbes in the body of a victim who died in an outbreak of the disease in Philadelphia in 1849.

The laboratory system is called a DNA microarray, which Livermore biologist Crystal Jaingsaid can recognize the genes of ancient disease organisms more than 10 times faster and more cheaply than gene-sequencing machines that are now used in DNA labs.

The device is called a lab on a chip because many of its operations have been combined into a single computer chip and results appear on a single glass slide 3 inches long.

The rapid and inexpensive detection of obscure disease germs could be particularly important for scientists trying to identify unknown microbes when unexpected epidemics break out, said Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in Canada, who heads the Ancient DNA Centre there.

In the immediate future, he said, the technology should prove useful for archaeologists hunting for ancient DNA in the human remains of vanished civilizations.

Poinar said that using the more conventional DNA sequencing techniques to detect ancient disease germs in his lab has been costing about $4,000 and has taken several weeks. But in the experiments with Livermore's DNA microarray system, identifying the same microbes has cost only $12 to $20 and taken only three to four days, he said.

"I was pretty skeptical at first that the Livermore system could perform," he said, "but it certainly worked as effectively as we hoped."

Poinar, an internationally known expert on ancient DNA, got his start as a graduate student in the genetics lab at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, and in 1992 he worked with his father, entomologist George O. Poinar at UC Berkeley, in pioneering efforts to extract ancient DNA from the bodies of insects that had been trapped in amber for millions of years.

The Livermore experiments with Poinar's group are reported in Scientific Reports, an online journal published by the British journal Nature.

Earlier experiments using conventional techniques by the Canadian scientists to identify cholera microbes from the 1949 Philadelphia outbreak were supported in part by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and were reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.